


Dance by the Light of the Moon

by pianolise



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: F/M, Hamiathes' Gift 2016, Pre-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 18:26:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7185179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pianolise/pseuds/pianolise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time he talks to his future wife, and it's because she's just stolen his medal. (aka: Fluff, Fluff Everywhere)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dance by the Light of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shewhoguards](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewhoguards/gifts).



> A/N: This story is so sappy. So, so sappy. I'm sorry everyone. With that said, it was a lot of fun to write and the characters evolved in my mind as I wrote it! The MoW is definitely portrayed as an uptight character in the books, but he must have had some less-rigid side to him to fall in love with Gen's mother. I wanted to explore the personality traits that could draw two such different people to each other. Since all we get of Gen's mother is the "charming court favorite" description, I wanted to explore what she might be like underneath that. (also tbh I wrote most of this during an all-nighter and I'm just desperately hoping they aren't horifically OOC)  
> Also: it would have felt really weird if I'd tried to give the characters names, but it was still awkward to have the two central characters in the story be totally nameless. Obviously the MoW can't be referred to as such when he's 19, and using "Queen Thief" all the time for Gen's mother would have felt really forced. tl;dr it was awkward to have to call the main characters "he" and "her" all the time MEGAN WHY CAN'T YOU GIVE THEM PROPER NAMES

He was nineteen when he fell in love. On leave from his first real post, he had suffered through a week of ceremony leading up to the midwinter feast. It had been his first time away from the megaron for any extended period − coming back, the megaron seemed smaller, the festivities more frivolous. For the past week, he'd snuck away to his rooms as often as he could, to read and spar with his cousins instead of attending court functions. Nonetheless, he was determined to have a good time at the feast. An hour in, and he was standing in a corner with his friends, fast on his way to getting blind drunk.

"Why are we standing here again? Why aren't we dancing?" His cousin Panides stared mournfully at a pack of girls standing a few yards away.

"Shut up, Pan," he grumbled. He didn't really like dancing; he preferred to drink in peace and talk with his friends. His friends, apparently, had other ideas. Panides, the traitor, grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him squarely into the center of the group of girls.

"Hello, ladies. Would any of you like to dance with my cousin here? Very nice, always keeps his hands to himself..." There was laughter, and one of the girls (he couldn't remember her name, but she looked familiar) playfully slapped Panides on the shoulder.

"Oh, let him go. He looks miserable!" For a moment, there was a glimmer of hope. "Actually... wait, you're the king's son, right?"

"Yes, but what does that have to do with−" She leaned in, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and ran away.

He stood still, slightly dazed, until Panides brought him back to reality. "Where's your medal?" He looked down at his uniform. He'd pinned a medal carved with an image of the Great Mountain on his chest. It was gone.

"Oh, gods, it was a gift from Da, he'll kill me if I lose it," he said, looking around for anywhere it could have fallen. Then he had a hunch. He looked up across the room, and saw her in the middle of a large group of dancers. They twirled all around her as she stood smugly, grinning at him as she held up his medal.

"Hey!" Stumbling a little, he pushed through the crowd in an effort to reach her. Just as he was getting close, she slipped out through the far doors. She was out of sight by the time he reached the hallway, but he could hear running footsteps just around the corner. He followed−why had he thought it was a good idea to start drinking this early?−and he chased her all the way across the megaron, nearly losing her but finding her again in the gardens. If she really wanted to run away from him, he knew she had at least ten ways to disappear in these halls. She was letting him follow her, taunting him. His father would kill him if he lost the medal − he could already imagine the next morning, his father squinting at him during breakfast and making snide comments about royal appearance. He might even be _sarcastic_.

Far ahead, he saw her disappear into the temple (out of all places, why there?) and burst in after her. When he got inside, the room was empty, and she was nowhere to be found. Some of the altars lining the walls were overflowing with gifts left by supplicants during the festival − Hephestia's altar for all kinds of prayers, Moira's for those hoping for a good future, Oceanus's for those hoping for rain. Others, belonging to more obscure gods, were nearly empty. At the very back of the room, in a recess, was the altar belonging to Eugenides.

It caught his eye, but at first he didn't realize why. As he looked at it, he noticed that most of the offerings to Eugenides were jewelry, and he recognized most of it from the necks and ears of half the women in the court. There were other, odder things too. There were several swords, three copies of the same map of Sounis, and a deed to a plot of land. There was also a full set of lock picks − and his medal.

Looking around furtively for anyone who might scold him, he reached out to take it.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you." He looked around for the source of the voice, and there she was, right behind him. He groaned.

"Or what? The gods will strike me down? I'll take that over the wrath of the king any day."

Her gaze darkened. "Why do you always talk like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you need to prove to everyone around you that the gods don't matter." He hadn't realized that was how it sounded. Most people didn't seem offended by it, anyway. But here she was, a pretty girl glaring at him because he'd apparently hit on something important to her.

"I don't mean − it's just that I think it's more important to focus on what I have here, and everything else can go work itself out. I don't actually have anything against−"

"That works for you, I suppose."

"What do you mean?"

"No, it's just, sometimes I forget − look, it's different for Thieves." She seemed an entirely different person from the one who'd been at the ball half an hour earlier. "You don't believe in the gods, they leave you alone for the most part. Every time that I climb up on a roof, I put myself in my god's hands. Every single night, I go up there and I pray that he will keep me safe for another night. I've seen... look, one night my father was teaching me how to break into a tower. We were climbing the wall, and he lost his grip a hundred feet in the air. He should have died, but instead he landed on a ledge a foot below him. I climbed that tower again the next week, and there was no ledge anywhere. I've heard stories of other thieves, who were saved from impossible situations time and time again. So by all means, steal that medal back if you must, but just remember it may be my life on the line because of it."

He set the medal down. "So what are these things doing here? I sort of understand the jewelry, but why the," he glanced at the altar again, "swords and maps and things?"

"The jewelry is just to annoy people. That's me. The other things− those are mostly my father, but I helped with some of them." She stopped and looked at him warily.

"Why? What's that look for?"

"You're the king's son." And his father had ranted about the Thief enough, hadn't he? Occasionally he would retreat to his rooms and scream at anyone who would listen that the King's Thief was a tradition that deserved to die forever and the current Thief deserved to be drop-kicked off the mountain. He always calmed down in the end, though, and he and the Thief usually were on good terms. There were centuries of uneasy partnership between kings and Thieves. But he was curious.

"So? I won't tell him anything."

"These two swords? They were your father's best swords. He always wore one of them into a battle. This one? It was your grandfather's."

"Why did you take them?"

"This was a few years ago, when he was planning to fight Attolia for coastal land − remember? It would have been a terrible move, but he wouldn't listen to counsel. So my father stole his swords, and some of his cannon, as a reminder of his limitations."

"That's − that's treason!"

"That's the prerogative of a Thief. Besides, we had most of the army and king's advisors on our side for that one. Your father − he's usually a good king, but sometimes he gets irrational and needs to be cut back down to size."

He thought about it and conceded the point. He respected his father, but he knew him better than almost anyone else. "But what if the Thief is the irrational one? Who cuts you down to size?"

"That's what soldiers are for, I guess. I don't usually spend too much time thinking about it from that side." She paused. "And...there's always our god. You don't have to believe it, but I do."

Eager to change the subject, he pointed at the deed for the land. "Why's that here? Don't tell me it's because my father wanted to buy an ill-advised goat farm."

She laughed. Come to think of it, he'd never really noticed her laugh before, just taken it for granted as a part of her. "He was trying to build a secret army of sheep to infiltrate Sounis and destroy the wool market."

"Why is it really here?"

"Several villagers from Ephus came to me complaining that their neighbor kept stealing their sheep. So I stole the deed to his land, and then tipped off one of your father's administrators that he was squatting on the land and didn't actually own it."

"What happened to the sheep?"

"I herded them into his house. The neighbors got them back after that, though."

He laughed. "I should go back to the ball. Gods only know what my friends think we're doing right now."

She followed him out into the garden, and they walked in silence through the empty megaron, having reached some sort of understanding.

*

(She never told him the flip side of the god's favor: how it was the right of all Thieves to die from a fall.)

*

Several weeks later, he woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. This happened sometimes, and usually he would read or drill with his wooden sword until he felt tired. Tonight, though, he felt restless. Nothing was working, and he was more awake than ever. Defeated, he put on his sandals and left his rooms.

In the stillness, it felt like the megaron itself was sleeping. He wandered down its corridors, with the vague idea to head for the gardens. Squares of moonlight shone through the windows onto the floor, making the tiles gleam. He had a tricky relationship with this time of night: he loved its calm, but he only ever saw it when he was restless with insomnia. He wandered, lost in thought, until something out the window caught his eye. 

He stopped to get a better look, and realized it was a person, standing on the roof of the neighboring wing. His first impulse was alarm: were they going to jump? Were they trapped? Then, as he watched, the person − woman, he realized − began to dance.

He knew that dance, had seen those movements across a crowded ballroom. It was her. There was no music that he could hear, but she danced anyways. He watched, enthralled, until she suddenly stopped, made a quick bow to empty air, and disappeared down the far side of the roof. Why would she do that? What made her dance? He continued on his walk with altogether new thoughts for company.

*

They began to meet up most days, sometimes in the garden, sometimes walking down corridors or around the training grounds. Everywhere they went, people greeted her with smiles and private jokes, and nodded to him as an afterthought. He didn't mind. Their vague something became the worst-kept secret of the court, and to his relief even his father turned a benevolent blind eye − she really did work her magic on everyone, didn't she? They talked about anything and everything that came to mind, and it was often late into the night before they parted.

He learned this about her: she believed with a quiet force that hid in her every motion. People looked at her and saw her charm, her jokes, and her smile, but they missed the woman underneath: the one that would cling to a rooftop and trust to nothing but her own skill and the gods to keep her alive. She believed in the gods like most people believed in the soil or the air, depending on them without the need to proclaim it to the world. Everything about her was foreign to him. She was beautiful and kind and frighteningly pragmatic − he liked pragmatic. He wanted to study her for a lifetime, forever. Maybe then he could begin to understand.

*

One night, she stopped him in a corridor on their way to dinner.

"Come out with me tonight." It took a second for her words to register; she was standing so close to him that he could see the warm brown fading to green in her eyes. He stood silent for another moment, thinking: I hate heights and I am a terrible dancer. He was also thinking: this is the real her, and she wants me to join her in the holiest thing she knows. There was no choice, really.

"Where should I meet you?" 

"I'll come by your room. Relax, you'll love it," she added, seeing the look on his face. Some of her friends passed by and she ran off to join them, leaving him alone.

*

That night, he was reading at his desk when he heard the tap at his window. He pulled his head out of his book to see her knocking on the frame, and ran across the room to let her in. She climbed inside, still wearing her clothes from earlier that evening. He looked down at himself, suddenly uncomfortably aware that the only shirt he was wearing was his pitifully thin undershirt, only halfway laced.

"Hello," he said, trying to lace up his shirt without drawing attention to the fact that it was unlaced.

"Hello," she said with a smirk. "Are you almost ready?"

He struggled with the sleeves of his overshirt for a moment, then looked over at her. Really, he was terrified at the thought of whatever she was about to make him do, but he couldn't back down now. "Whenever you are, my lady." He made a joking bow, adding silly flourishes that only his etiquette instructor would have taken seriously.

She perched on the window ledge, half in and half out. She looked at him hard, taking in the terror he was trying not to show. "Are you sure?" He nodded weakly. "You don't need to worry. A Thief and her companion are always protected on nights like this."

"Just this once."

She held out her hand, and he took it, and followed her out into the night. 

*

The night was warm and clear, and the stars were out in full force. It was the first time the Queen Thief danced with a companion on the rooftop, and the only time she would ever persuade him to go with her. He was, as promised, a terrible dancer: during the first dance he stepped on her toes three times and perpetually tried to spin her in the wrong direction. She laughed, and taught him how to do the thing properly by spinning him until he was dizzy. In the spin, he forgot his father, and his fear of heights, and everything but the rooftop and the stars and the feeling of her hand in his.

When the world finally stopped tilting around him, he found himself facing her, only a hands' breadth away. In the dark, he could barely make out her face, but he could hear her breathing, quick from the dancing. They stood like this for a while before he spoke.

"Thank you. For showing me... this."

"Thank you, for coming with me. And everything, really. I mean, most people, they'd laugh at me if I started going off about the gods. But you don't. You want to know, even if you don't believe. I go against your father, and you see that as a reason to debate with me rather than a reason to exile me. The world needs more people like that."

And, gods, he'd never expected anyone to see that as a _good_ thing. But here she was, and she wasn't going to go away. There was another silence, expectant and alive. Then he leaned in and kissed her.

It was hesitant at first, as he waited for her response. Then she kissed him back, and suddenly nothing else in the world mattered.


End file.
